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Retrieving off-topic documents to a user's pre-defined area of interest via a search engine is potentially a violation of access rights and is a concern to every private, commercial, and governmental organization. We improve content-based off-topic search detection approaches by using a sequence of user queries versus the individual queries. In this approach, we reevaluate how off-topic a query is, based on the sequence of queries that preceded it. Our empirical results show that using the information from the queries in a given query window, the false alarm rate is reduced by a statistically significant amount.

Knowledge of relationships among categories is of the interest in different domains such as text classification, content analysis, and text mining. We propose and evaluate approaches to effectively identify relationships among document categories. Our proposed novel method capitalizes on the misclassification results of a text classifier to identify potential relationships among categories. We demonstrate that our system detects such relationships, even those relationships that assessors failed to identify in manual evaluation. Furthermore, we favorably compare the effectiveness of our methods with the state of art method and demonstrate a significant improvement in precision (34%) and recall (5%).

The dearth of women choosing information technology (IT) careers has been identified as a national problem in the United States. Efforts have been made to combat this by educating girls at a young age about technology. Recent research demonstrates that exposure to technology is insufficient to change young girls’ attitudes towards IT careers and that interventions must explicitly tie technology activities to careers. Faculty and staff of a Midwestern university modified an IT summer camp for middle school girls to include career specific programming. The camp deployed the Girls Educating Themselves about Information Technology (GET IT) program to garner interest among middle school girls in IT careers. This article describes the impact of this summer camp and other social influence factors on girls’ interest in pursuing careers in IT, immediately after camp completion and one year in the future.

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